January, 1993
One afternoon like this in January of '93, Chad asked me over to his
machine where he wanted to show me something. It was called the
"World Wide Web" and it was developed by some guy named Tim
Berners-Lee in Switzerland at CERN. I thought this was cool because I
knew CERN was a cool particle physics research lab that I knew about,
being a physics major and all. The web as it looked then was plain
text, with some words in brackets, followed by numbers. Sort of like:
This page is maintained by [Tim Berners-Lee][7].
Then, at the bottom of the screen, you could enter any of the numbers
and it would take you to another document somehow related to the words
that had preceeded the number. It was sort of cool, but was didn't
seem that different from gopher and was a bit uglier when it came down
to it.